Managed Hosting For Web Development

Manage posting kind of industry is changing right now. It used to be the case just a few years ago that you would rent machines from a data center, like, these machines would already be installed and configured and you could just, you know, rent five of them. Could do all of this online and the industry’s changed a little bit. This is kind of new system of dealing with this which is basically kind of this match hosting cloud set up and that’s, that’s what I’m going to focus on here, because the kind of in between guys aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be. So these are players like AWS. Rackspace, Linode, I think, kind of does this sort of thing. They’re all those, these are the ones I’ve heard of. Reddit and Hitmonth both use AWS, it’s my personal favorite.

Generally the idea is you are renting machines. In the case of Amazon, I can’t speak for others; you rent machines by the hour. So we pay $.10 an hour or something for our machines on Amazon. You don’t have to think too much about bandwidth and power. You don’t think about power at all. Bandwidth you generally pay some amount for. You can install the operating system if you want. More likely you’re just configuring the OS, not installing it. You’re in the system where your machines can just kind of disappear. If your machines fail, the hosts may bring up a new machine for you or they may notify you or you can write scripts to automate this whole thing. This is the area where I like to live personally.

Still get control over your machines in the sense that you can, you know exactly what software is installed, what versions are installed, what kernel is installed, all of that stuff. But you don’t have to deal with actually installing this machine in a rack and replacing them by hand and doing the physical work. It’s all virtual. I’ve never seen the service that host Reddit and Hitmonth. With Reddit we started out renting a few machines from this manage hostings provider, kind of pre-Amazon pre-Rackspace seven years ago. Then we started co-locating our own machines and then when Amazon, AWS, Amazon Web Services came out, that’s when Reddit switched to Amazon. In the office, in the Reddit office, there’s a bunch of physical machines sitting under a desk that used to actually run Reddit. 20, 30 machines, whatever there were.